AMD, which makes processors for PCs and servers, is getting ready to lay off anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of its employees in the next few weeks. The company is expected to announce the number of lay offs in the next week -- around the time it will be reporting its quarterly financial results.

This marks AMD's second big staff cut in a year's time. About a year ago, it cut 10 percent of its employees. At the end of Q2 2012, the company said it had 11,737 employees.

Why is AMD making such drastic reductions in staff? Mainly because it is struggling to compete with other chip makers like Intel. Intel has not only grabbed the PC and server markets, but has also dipped into the mobile market as well, offering tablet and smartphone chips. AMD, on the other hand, hasn't made a push for mobile yet. This is clearly problematic, considering the PC market has been in decline in favor of mobile devices, and chip makers like Intel and AMD have to adapt to stay alive.

In addition to competition, SemiAccurate reported that AMD's board is a huge reason as to why the company was forced to make staff cuts. The report said that AMD's board is "incompetent" and that the company "staffed senior management with toadies who would do their bidding rather than do the right thing." SemiAccurate noted that AMD is mainly cutting engineers, and that AMD likely will not survive with this cut.

AMD has already announced ahead of its quarterly earnings report that that revenue would decrease 10 percent instead of the previously forecasted four percent decrease to two percent increase.

However, AMD is hoping for a brighter future with its first mobile chip release for Windows 8 tablets this year.

Server wise AMD aren't doing to bad, they do have the 12 core Interlagos which was a step up from the 12 core Magny-cours. (Not a typo.)

Good thing for AMD is that servers can generally use every single thread you throw at it and it's usually integer heavy which plays into the Bulldozers architecture's strength.

However these days a larger emphasis has been placed on TDP's in the server space as power consumption is a massive cost burden, which is where Intel based servers shine over AMD's ones.

And don't kid AMD, they know how lucrative the server space is, which is only going to accelerate as more and more devices rely on the internet, which was how we got Bulldozer in the first place with it's poor floating point but excellent integer performance.

But in the Mid-Range and High-End consumer space, the sad fact remains they severely dropped the ball.

Whether it will be fixed when they "fuse" the GPU into the CPU tightly enough where the GPU handles floating point remains to be seen, GPU's after all are very good at such tasks, but cutting back on engineering isn't going to accelerate such a transition unfortunately.